"You've done some of the meanest and dirtiest work a man can stoop to. You've skulked and crawled and slunk through the dark to rob women and children!"
"Who's given you a license to call me a coward?"
"Do you dare to intimate there's anything but low and arrant cowardice in work like this?"
"Just try it," he said with a grin that made his face hideous.
"Why should I try it?" I demanded. "Do you suppose because I don't carry a jimmy and gun that I can't face honest danger when I need to?"
I glanced round at my den walls, studded with trophies as they were, from the bull moose over the fireplace to the leopard pelt under my heels. The other man followed my glance, but with a lip-curl of contempt. He had jumped to the conclusion, of course, that those relics of encounter in the open stood as a sort of object-lesson of bravery which belonged to me in person.
"Bah," he said, apparently glad to crowd me off into some less personal side-issue, "that's all play-actin'. Get up against what I have, and you'd tone down your squeal. Then you'd walk into the real thing."
"The real thing, black-jacking chambermaids and running like a pelted cur at the sight of a brass button!"
I could see his sudden wince, and that it took an effort for him to speak.
"You'd find it took nerve, all right, all right," he retorted. "And the kind o' nerve that ain't a cuff-shooter's long suit."